An unfair review of Margaret Boden's The Creative Mind from the perspective of creative systems: (Basic Books, New York, 1991); 303 pages
✍ Scribed by David Perkins
- Book ID
- 102989471
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1995
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 1009 KB
- Volume
- 79
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0004-3702
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Changing the rules of the game is often unsettling, but it can be fruitful. Consider for instance the tale of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot. According to Greek legend, the knot itself was an intricate tangle tied by Gordius, king of Phrygia. An oracle forecast that whosoever could undo the Gordian knot would rule all of Asia. Alexander wanted that prophecy working for him. Not one to hover over niceties, he drew his sword and cut it through, thus "untying" the knot.
Alexander's move both impresses and annoys. It impresses with its decisiveness of action and its creativity. It annoys because Alexander changed the tacit rules. To cut the knot through is not what one would imagine undoing the knot should amount to. It's unfair! All this connects in a couple of ways to Margaret Boden's 1991 book The Creative Mind. First of all, in her exploration of creative thought, Boden addresses the key question: What really makes the difference between genuinely creative thought and not-so-creative, albeit effective, thought? At the heart of her answer lies the idea of changing the rules. Often, highly productive thinking occurs within the boundaries of established tacit or explicit rule systems. The results can be valuable in many ways. However, Boden urges, the term creativity applies in its richest sense when the process of thought involves changing the rules, not just working within them. With the changed rules, new and surprising ideas can emerge-sometimes even easily-that never would have proved accessible from within the framework of the old rules.
For a second connection to the tale of Alexander, Boden herself is not reluctant to change the tacit rules of the game in examining creativity itself. Usually, human creative thought is probed from the perspective of human psychology, sometimes with a psychoanalytic spin (e.g. [l]), sometimes through the eye of a generalist (e.g. [6]), and sometimes even from the platform of cognitive psy-* (Basic Books, New York, 1991); 303 pages.